About Us

AppBaan is really just me, and SwatchMatic is my first mobile app — created right here in polychromatic Bangkok.

I work by day in a technical role, but it doesn’t involve programming (and my BA in English from a land grant university in a certain Mormon-dominated state in America didn’t really teach me any coding either).

I’ve picked up the programming along the way, with the help of the many great online resource I list in on the credits page. You could call it a hobby, but I’ve become quite obsessed by it, so perhaps it’s more than that. (I hope anyone who’s curious about programming will consult those resources. Programming is definitely a subject the the Internet seems designed to teach, and you should take advantage if you have any curiosity about it all. Though we think of programming as a left brain activity, I think it “plugs in” nicely to so many right brain pursuits.)

I like color too, as you may have guessed, and the very first thing I ever coded also involved color palette creation. It was called Chroma-some and it’s still alive here as a GoogleApp. It too helps you make color palettes, but by means of a crude genetic algorithm that let’s you select colors for “breeding” (yes, colors have genitals too).

SwatchMatic isn’t exactly a blockbuster app — not yet anyway — but I’ve been excited to watch it grow to 30K downloads in just a few months. It’s the only thing I’ve ever made that so many people have used, and that’s a very gratifying feeling.

That growth, such as it is, is exclusively due to network effect — it’s only now that I’ve given any thought to “marketing”. And watching it grow, I’ve also become very interested in how ideas spread virally and how massive markets like Google Play operate.

Anyway, I’m meandering now, as I’m prone to do. Thanks for your interest in SwatchMatic. I hope you find many uses for it, and that it helps you make the world a slightly more colorful place (in the most harmonious of ways, of course).